The background of Israel is a much-debated subject in outdated testomony reports. On one aspect are minimalists who locate little of ancient worth within the Hebrew Bible. at the different facet are those that imagine the biblical textual content is an actual historic checklist. Many critical scholars of the Bible locate themselves among those positions and would get advantages from a cautious exploration of concerns in Israelite history.

This sizeable historical past of Israel textbook values the Bible's historic contribution with no overlooking serious matters and demanding situations. that includes the most recent scholarship, the publication introduces scholars to the present country of study on concerns correct to the research of historical Israel. The editors and participants, all best biblical students and historians, speak about old facts in a readable demeanour, utilizing either canonical and chronological lenses to discover Israelite history.

Illustrative goods, resembling maps and pictures, visually help the book's content material. Tables and sidebars also are included.

An research of Jewish identification politics and Jewish modern ideology utilizing either pop culture and scholarly texts. Jewish id is tied up with probably the most tough and contentious problems with this day. the aim during this booklet is to open lots of those matters up for dialogue. due to the fact that Israel defines itself brazenly because the ‘Jewish State’, we must always ask what the notions of ’Judaism’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Jewish culture’ and ‘Jewish ideology’ stand for.

During the last forty five years Professor Pieter W. van der Horst contributed generally to the research of historic Judaism and early Christianity. The 24 papers during this quantity, written for the reason that his early retirement in 2006, hide a variety of themes, them all about the non secular global of Judaism and Christianity within the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine period.

The millennia-old port of Jaffa, now a part of Tel Aviv, used to be referred to as the "Bride of Palestine," one of many really cosmopolitan towns of the Mediterranean. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, labored, and celebrated together—and it was once usual for the Arabs of Jaffa to wait a marriage on the residence of the Jewish Chelouche kin or for Jews and Arabs to either assemble on the Jewish spice store Tiv and the Arab Khamis Abulafia's twenty-four-hour bakery.

10 In my view, either type of literary tradition is capable of preserving reliable historical information, and so I eschew skepticism as a legitimate position vis-à-vis the textual evidence. However, I also believe that literary features of these materials occasionally alert us to genres and literary types that are not intended to be taken as historiography in any modern sense of that term. Such complexity requires a nuanced methodology that takes each episode of the narratives individually in the process of assessing them for historical value.

First and foremost among those problems is that the opening chapters describe characters and events in a world dramatically different from our own: a world with talking serpents, with life before cities, before agriculture, before music or metallurgy; a world in which humans were unified with one language; and more. We cannot begin to locate these characters and events in a particular time or place, which is, of course, one of the tasks of any study of history. These chapters are, in fact, presented from a perspective before history, if we assume that history is properly understood as a time when humans began to write accounts of the past (a definition that itself is difficult to refine).